TWILIGHT ON NOB HILL

She doesn't smoke, she doesn't drink. Yes, in her hometown dialect she swears like a dockworker - courtesy of her mother's rhetorical habitus - but she has never sworn at me.
In all ways except that she was seeing me, she was an exemplary woman.

And she still is. We broke up half a year ago. She's now seeing someone else, though she still shares the apartment.

Even when she told me it was over, she was as gentle as she could be.
I don't think she wanted to hurt me, but she never realized how deeply it did actually wound me. After twenty one years, she ended up believing that our relationship had run it's course.
It hadn't. Not for me. But she does not understand that.

In a way I can see her point of view - not that I agree with it, please understand - and I do not want to win her back. What's done is done. She needs to live her life her own way.
I am honoured that she still considers me her friend.
Possibly more than anyone else could be, she is my confidant, my fellow conspirator. She is someone whom I have trusted with things that no one else can know, and I am certain that those secrets are safe in her care.
Trust is not easily earned - and there are things she has told me I likewise will not divulge.

Whoever I have the good fortune to fall in love with in the future will also have her own secrets held safe, and will similarly be nicknamed rather than identified on this blog or elsewhere on the internet.
I excercise caution in my affairs (the horrible wordplay is accidental, NOT intended), and I am resolved that my attentions will not be aimed at someone lacking certain characteristics - characteristics which Savage Kitten in fact exemplifies.
Such people deserve privacy.

However, that rather leaves me hosed and S out of L in this town. Someone of moderate and reserved personal habits - who does not have tattoos, piercings, or a history of flamboyantly reprehensible behaviour - where does one find such a person?
Someone trustworthy and unflinching?
Someone who reads, thinks, responds thoughtfully, and tries to be ethical and honest - in San Francisco?
Decades ago it could have been easier. Behaviour was more controlled (or so it now seems), and even young people often had standards. Not standards that were exceptionally high for their era, but which are nevertheless rather rare in this day and age.

I also think that literacy was more valued then. My parents generation (or at least they and their associates) considered books to be worthwhile acquisitions, precious possessions.
Other than us 'eccentrics', does anyone STILL value texts?

When Savage Kitten graduated from college, with two degrees, summa cum laude, I was so proud of her. She had paid for her education herself, and had studied in the face of her parents' typically Toishanese insistence that academia (beyond something purely cosmetic, like 'secretarial skills') was wasted on a girl. Her brothers had been supported through college, but for several years she was actively discouraged from pursuing it much further.
Just graduate, girl, and then get married.

I was in the back row at her graduation, because her family was also in attendance. But at the ceremony for the dean's list, I was the only one she invited.
Even today, nearly two decades later, I am incredibly pleased that she asked me to be there.
I could not be more honoured.

I am still inordinately proud of her perseverance and her determination.
She is a woman of valour. Her new boyfriend is one lucky son-of-abitch.

I have been rather extraordinarily fortunate in my life. I know Savage Kitten.
I know several fine people in our little branch of the great conspiracy - rabbit mom and her husband and children, the doctor and his family, the Torah reader and his two sons.
Plus a book merchant and his educator parents, Rabbi P. and the ursine blogger, and several other people whom I shall not describe in any detail. Including quite a few folks who are fluent in Dutch, Yiddish, German, Russian, Lawyerese, Designer-gibberish and Engineering, plus a number of Cantonese, Hokkien, and Indonesian speakers.
All of these people are blessings - and I do not say that lightly. I'm rather picky, and I set the bar far far higher for my associates than I would ever do for myself.

[Yeah, quite unfair, I know. Though why on earth should I demand as much of myself as I do of others? These are the people with whom I really want to associate - a man is judged by his friends, and from the rabbit holders to the toireh leyner, it gives me great pride to know these people.]

But where and how shall I find a new helpmeet of whom I can be as proud?
How am I to find a thoughtful woman, who reads (habitually and with great enjoyment as a passionate personal enterprise), who does not think inordinately much of her sexual attributes, does not make a public spectacle of herself, or get tattoed like a hunk of meat?

Are there, really, any young ladies in this city in whom one can have such pride? Are there still women who value themselves too much to engage in conceited and self-indulgent misbehaviour?
Women with realistic self-respect?

Or am I just wasting my time even considering people who are decent, intelligent, and actually have standards?


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